Screening Under Strain: Operational Overload, Human Impact and the Technology Decisions That Matter

Compliance officers and screening teams are operating under unprecedented pressure. Sanctions volatility, rising transaction volumes, and increasingly complex data requirements have pushed many teams to breaking point — operationally and personally. This episode explores what that pressure looks like day‑to‑day, why it has become a systemic industry problem, and what compliance teams need from screening solutions to make compliance a more sustainable job.

DISCLAIMER: The information provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to and shall not be used as legal advice.  The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of LexisNexis Risk Solutions. LexisNexis Risk Solutions does not warrant that the information provided in this podcast is accurate or error-free.

Transcript

Welcome And The Hidden Strain

Cindy Printer 0:11

Welcome to the RegTech Pulse podcast, where industry experts discuss the latest trends in financial crime compliance. I'm your host, Cindy Printer, and today we're diving into the pressures facing compliance officers and screening teams. We often talk about challenges like rising sanctions and growing regulations putting pressure on operator teams. But what doesn't get enough attention is just how deeply the strain hits the people actually doing the work, the emotional, the mental, and the personal toll that comes with these roles. But before we get into things, I'd like to introduce Luke Wymer here with me today. Luke, you spent your time helping companies navigate the tricky environment of sanctioned screening and compliance, ultimately making sure they get set up with solutions that actually work for them. Does that sound about right?

Luke Wymer 1:08

It does. And thanks, Indi. Great to be here today. An exciting topic, but an incredibly important one when you're looking at it from a compliance landscape and perspective. You know, there are real challenges and real issues that are affecting these teams on a human and a personal level, which is often overlooked, I think, in the context of how these screening operations happen in the financial crime compliance world. So I'm excited to talk through a few of those topics with you as we as we go through.

Cindy Printer 1:35

Great. Let's do it. So to set the scene, let's start by acknowledging the very real pressure that comes with running a compliance program. So when we ask, how do you balance commercial pressure with increasingly complex sanction obligations? What we're really asking is how much can one team realistically carry? So I'm super interested to hear your thoughts on that, Luke.

Luke Wymer 2:01

Yeah, thanks, Cindy. It's a really interesting question. And I think there are a few important drivers that are at play here when we consider realistically what teams are enabled and able to support, you know, in the regulatory landscape. I think a primary driver from my perspective is simply the number of alerts that are coming out of the systems that these organizations are using for their screening purposes across sanctions and watchlists, PEPs and everything else in between that they need to do. And I say that because a lot of these companies, organizations are doing this with teams and budgets that have simply not changed over the last few years, which is comparable to the increase in sort of sanctions designations and pressures they're getting from a regulatory point of view that are essentially increasing the workload with those teams that have not improved and expanded the scope of what they're able to handle. Those systems and processes can be outdated. They haven't moved, you know, with the increase in those designations that have come over time. And simply the pressure being put on compliance officers to deal with that is expanding. The role of a compliance officer is incredibly difficult in that regard because they're sort of sandwiched between two core areas. It's it's the increasing pressure from the expectations and regulatory bodies to potentially increase penalties and all of the different designations that are coming. But on the other hand, you know, internal business pressures to keep up and ensure that payments and messages are being processed and cleared, you know, with an adequate time frame to keep their business running, you know, ensure that it's successful from a revenue generating standpoint. And um that puts them in a very difficult middle ground.

Cindy Printer 3:42

Yeah. And some of what you said, I'd really like to dig into a little bit and zero in on that human element of things. Because one of the biggest drivers of strain isn't just volume, it's the quality of the alerts. And noisy systems, as we know, generate huge numbers of false positives. And that means analysts are spending most of their time clearing alerts that just don't represent real risk. And that creates this cycle of repetitive, low-value work. But the catch is, as we know, you still have to treat every alert as potentially serious. So you've got these highly trained people operating in a constant state of vigilance, doing work that's just mentally draining and over time disengaging. And that might sound like an operational issue, but actually it's also a board-level risk. Because fatigue doesn't just impact morale. We know it impacts decision making. And when analysts are overloaded and desensitized by noise, that likelihood of missing a genuine suspicious activity goes up. And that's where it becomes really material for shareholders. Because the missed sanctions isn't just a process failure, it's a potential regulatory fine, enforcement action, and that really serious and impactful reputational damage that directly affects that shareholder value. So, kind of bringing it full circle, what looks like inefficiency at that frontline can translate into that financial regulatory and reputational risk. But there's that talent risk. There's that, you know, what is it doing to our teams and our operators? Because burned out teams see higher turnover and replacing experienced compliance professionals is both expensive and slow. So when we talk about that, Luke, what's the breakthrough? How do we truly reduce false positives and alert fatigue when working harder just isn't an option anymore?

Cutting False Positives With Better Tech

Luke Wymer 5:48

Yeah, it's a great question and um a difficult problem to solve, but one I think which has a very clear answer in terms of what the industry and these organizations need to move towards, you know, within their different screening programs. I'm going to pull out and reference just a real um stat here from our own survey, in that 63% of customers are reporting false positive rates as high as 96 to 99%. So to your point, that's an incredibly huge number, um, incredibly big number, excuse me, that um they're having to work through, and it's naturally compounded by all of the issues sort of outlined there, as terms of the knock-on effects that's contributing towards um operator fatigue and having to work through that number. And just to um hammer home that point, PWC's most recent global compliance survey highlights the rising regulatory complexity, uh cost pressure, and growing dependence on data and technology without proportional increases in headcom. Um so the real question then becomes how can you reduce that high number of false positives? How do you get that 96 to 99% number down to something that's more sustainable, something more manageable, that can um you know better align to your compliance program and ensure the teams underneath are successful in covering the real risk that matters while you know disregarding or at least moving past um the noise that is taking up inordinate amounts of time for these compliance operations. Technology is the real key driver in how you can do that. And there's there's various ways that can be explored within your wider screening operations to improve and enhance that experience when it comes to false positives. Starting all the way at the front in the data sets that are incorporated and screened against, ensuring there's enough enriched data on both the customer and watchlist side to help your later rule sets and recommendations to come to the right decision around whether an alert is closed. That also then gets into the next space of, you know, perhaps advanced false positive reduction techniques that the industry is exploring to help remediate and move through those alerts from rules-based decisioning engines to risk-based scoring engines, all the way to potential artificial intelligence techniques that can be leveraged for alert remediation. There's a lot of factors that can be um explored to ultimately enhance that experience.

Cindy Printer 8:06

Yes, because from what our customers tell us, it's not about piling on more controls. It's about stripping out the friction where the risk hasn't changed, right? They want real false positive reduction, not simply marginal gains. And there's a lot more talk around continuous monitoring and continuous screening that only alerts on meaningful change. So there's no reworking that same cleared name. And yet, our customers still need that clear, defensible explanation for why an alert did or didn't trigger, right? So that importance of being able to explain why an alert happened or didn't. So what are you seeing in that area? So we know, you know, we've got to focus on um not overworking, not over fatiguing our operators by reducing false positives. We know one of those, as you've explained, ways to do that is, you know, really ensuring that an effective solution is in place. So now as we drill down into that effective solution and we think through being able to explain how that solution is working and the decisions that our operators are making, what are your thoughts on that piece of things and the solutions that are out there today that enable that ability to have provide those clear explanations for an auditor?

Audit Trails That Reduce Anxiety

Luke Wymer 9:36

It's a very good question because not only do you obviously, as you've said, need to reduce the number of alerts that are going into that system or coming out of that system, you need to very clearly articulate why that system has come to the decision that it has. So the auditability and essentially audit trail of what um has been decided on an alert becomes a critical component, not just from a visibility perspective internally, but also that generation point externally, you know, proving to the regulator, to the auditor what has come in and why from these systems. So there's again a balancing act that needs to be made there behind the intelligent and false positive reduction screening techniques that are being applied, whether they range from basic rules-based systems all the way to artificial intelligence-driven systems to describe the output of what these um machines and various techniques are doing by leveraging what we have here at Lexus Nexus Risk Solutions via Arborager Insight. And I'll pause there and revisit the solutions bit. So, Cindy, we've spoken about the need for these solutions to have robust audit trail techniques be explainable, you know, um, and the regulator comes around to explore why decisions have been made in the way that they have. But what's the real human impact of that? Yes, the screening solutions are doing this and they should have this in place, but how does having that comprehensive list and documentation of the decisions that have been made ultimately influence and make the lives of the compliance officers a bit easier?

Cindy Printer 11:06

I mean, the more we can do to support our operators and the decisions they're making and do that in an automated fashion, we have processes and policy in place. And if the technology can further support why these decisions were made, it removes some of that strain, actually, quite a lot of strain when the regulators come in, as you spoke about, when the auditors are there. And so that's just one additional way that we can reduce that operator fatigue. A Corporate compliance insight survey from 2025 cited a very impactful statistic, which is nearly half of compliance officers report anxiety linked directly to their role with workload and resource strain repeatedly cited as that root cause. So when you've talked about technology and the solutions, can you get into though a little bit more about what Lexus Nexus Risk Solutions offers to solve for these problems?

Luke Wymer 12:18

Yeah, of course. Um so just before I dive into the underlying screening solutions themselves that support a variety of different use cases across that entire sort of screening workflow to make operators' lives a bit easier. I do want to stress one point, um, which we'll know is the importance of the data. Very quickly hit on it as we were going through earlier in our chat here, but um without that comprehensive data set on the watch list side and good data on the customer side, you're going to have a tough time enabling all of these later solutions in the workflow to make their correct and comprehensive decision based on the available data points. The better data that goes in, the better data that comes out. And so ensuring the data set that combines and joins up with your underlying screening solution is effective in working with that screening solution is incredibly important before you get to the solution itself. At LexusNexis Risk Solutions, we do have those screening solutions, which I'll cover in a little more detail in just a second, but we also have the data, and that's a real core important point. I think our customers have seen real benefit from driving. You know, having these interrelated and intertwined data sets and screening software solutions to ensure everything is working correctly together in the way that it should, and to most effectively come to the risk-based decisions that are needed as part of this setup. You know, it reduces that later strain on having to make decisions against potential alerts that are surfaced. But when it comes to the screening software solutions themselves, we have our Bridget Insight XG and our FERCO continuity screening solutions that can help here. Each of them are enabled with a vast range of capabilities across the end-to-end screening lifecycle. Again, starting all the way back at that data integration, but then all the way across to various risk-based techniques to reduce and refine the number of alerts that are coming out of the underlying screening engine. And most importantly, enabling the operators with the controls that they need to configure and tweak that based on their risk appetite and various policies and procedures, alongside generating that comprehensive and robust audit trail right at the end. So, you know, all of those decisions that have been made are fully explainable, fully justifiable, and could be generated with relative ease. While we've covered the underlying solution and the data set as important, the real core message to take away from this is that the screening challenges associated with needing these systems is not going away. There's a negative impact there that those pressures have on compliance teams that we've covered. And it's only going to get worse if nothing is done to help them. The best way to help them is by leveraging various advanced techniques that are obviously available across solutions like we've outlined, but it's all in how responsive and quickly these compliance teams can move to keep up with the curve and this ever-shifting geopolitical landscape that's driving the increase in designations that is applying additional pressure to them. The way that the industry responds, particularly the technology and data choices it makes, is going to determine whether compliance teams remain under that constant strain or finally get breathing room to do that work that actually matters. So it's not just a technology issue, even though the technology is important to help solve those issues. It's ultimately about the sustainability of a career in compliance.

Sustainability In Compliance And Closing

Cindy Printer 15:36

It's a great perspective, Luke. And just to summarize, people don't go into compliance to clear endless alerts, right? That's what I hear you saying. They go into to stop real harm and make a real difference. But in reality, there is sustained pressure, this constant scrutiny and decisions that carry out real consequences. And over time, as we've talked about, that leads to fatigue, stress, and burnout. And that's, I think, a great point to leave on. The people doing this work every day are a critical line of defense for the financial systems. They need to be supported with effective technology, that effective data that works in conjunction with the technology. But if the teams themselves, the people doing the work every day, are overwhelmed or under-supported, that risk doesn't disappear. It just grows. So it's not just an operational issue, it's a strategic one. Supporting compliance teams with the right resources, investment, and technology, not a nice to have. It's essential. Luke, thank you so much for joining me today. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. If you want to learn more about the topics discussed in this episode, we'll include a link in the show notes alongside a link to our website so you can learn more about how we can help. To everyone, stay tuned for the next episode.